No one is invincible!

Created by military strategist and USAF Colonel John Boyd, OODA stands for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act.  Quoting from Wikipedia,

According to Boyd, decision-making occurs in a recurring cycle of observe-orient-decide-act.  An entity (whether an individual or an organization) that can process this cycle quickly, observing and reacting to unfolding events [...], can gain the advantage.

The speed and agility of the decision-making loop is key.  The greater the body of information that can be brought to bear quickly to orient one’s decisions, the more productive each action will be.

Different team members need different information to orient themselves.

• Verification engineers need to observe:
  • which tests are passing and failing
  • who is doing checkin operations
  • what is the historical behavior of each test
  • which tests are most likely to detect a bug at a given point in time

• Design engineers need similar metrics:
  • which RTL blocks are most likely to see timing failures
  • which lines of code have changed the most over time
  • which lint warnings represent the most risk in each block

• Managers tend to observe trends and comparisons:
  • how has timing improved over the last few weeks
  • how many bugs are being filed
  • how many tests are passing and failing per week
  • which blocks have the most: warnings, timing failures, bug reports, code changes

These lists can be long, but the genius of the OODA model is that it applies to everyone in an organization.  The DV Notebook is designed to accelerate all aspects of observing and orienting unfolding events in a design and verification environment.  Information is brought together from many sources into customized dashboards.  This provides proper context for decisions and actions.  Many of the most common actions can be simplified to a single mouse click to initiate debug, file a bug report, rerun a simulation, or browse detailed reports.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 9:12 am and is filed under DVCon09, Engineering Practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.